Drupal 6.15 and 5.21 released
Drupal 6.15 and 5.21, maintenance releases which fix issues reported through the bug tracking system, as well as non critical security vulnerabilities, are now available for download. Both releases fix other smaller issues as well.
Upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement, more information on the 5.x releases can be found in Drupal 5.0 release announcement.
DP Bestflow: The Definitive Online Guide to Digital Photography
After a highly successful Drupal deployment for the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) national website, the ASMP decided to again use Drupal for their next project: Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow, or dpBestflow for short. DP Bestflow is a Library of Congress-funded initiative to provide an all-encompassing resource for digital photography best practices.
The ASMP once again teamed up with Chicago's Grillo Group for graphic design, and Philadelphia-based web development firm Context to perform the Drupal implementation. The most impressive part of the site, however, is the immense amount of rich, useful content, the majority of which is the handiwork of digital photography gurus Richard Anderson (author of Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow) and Peter Krogh (author of The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers).
Automated testing 2.1 deployed - contributed projects
After a lot of work, waiting, staging, and such I am proud to announce the addition of contributed projects to the automated testing system. Contributed projects may now take advantage of the same system that Drupal core developers have been using for over a year with great success. The deployment comes quickly after the recent 2.0 launch in late November of 2009. In addition to adding support for contributed project testing a number of other features have been added, most notably:
- Coder and Coder Tough Love review support.
- General e-mail notifications - the devlist mailing list will get an e-mail when Drupal core breaks.
- A number of UI/workflow improvments on drupal.org.
- Grouping of reviews by type or plugin to make room for a cleaner multiple database testing workflow.
- Additional administrative tools for qa.drupal.org and testing clients.
- Views RSS feed plugin for aggregation of test events and results.
For an example of the test results, please take a look at the current Drupal 7 (HEAD) results or one of our beta contributed project results, such as poormanscron.
DrupalCon SF Session Submissions Open
The San Francisco DrupalCon organizing committee is happy to announce that session submissions are open!
Come see the sessions that have already been proposed, and if you can't find exactly what you're looking for, suggest your own. Drupal's community is what sets it apart from the pack, so come be a part of the magic!
The session submission and voting schedule is:
- January 15, 2010 to February 15, 2010 - Session Submissions Open
- February 16, 2010 - March 1, 2010 - Public Voting on Sessions
- March 5, 2010 - Speakers Notified
- March 15, 2010 - Final Schedule Posted
SharkScopers
SharkScopers is a Drupal 6 site that allows online poker instructors to sell screencast tutorial videos. The first two minutes can be viewed by anyone. Users can purchase credits that unlock whole videos. Instructors then receive a cut of the profit.
Jonathan Brown from Blue Droplet Media in Edinburgh, Scotland, has been helping Mike Jonas from SharkScope in New York develop the site for more than a year. It uses Jonathan's Blue Droplet Video module extensively.
Mike had done a lot of research into what system should be used to build the site. His primary motivation for choosing Drupal was so that Blue Droplet Video could be used. He was blown away by how BDV integrates with CCK and Views, allowing the fundamentals of the site to be created with great ease.
Jonathan and Mike have very well defined roles within the project. For each task, they consult via email and Skype to construct robust specifications. Jonathan then implements the required functionality. A release early, release often methodology is used, allowing the site to innovate rapidly.
The fantastic theme was created entirely by Mike as a Zen sub-theme.
Autism therapy site with autotagging and GeoIP-enabled directory
Healing Thresholds Autism Therapy provides comprehensive therapy fact sheets, daily updates of research and news, and a global directory of autism therapists. The site has become a standard and definitive source for autism treatment information. In particular, the site provides layperson-accessible summaries of essentially all child-focused research from the last 3 years, in addition to earlier seminal papers.
The two biggest challenges of the site have been to expose all of the deep content we've authored and to monetize it. We have over 2000 carefully-written research and news summaries and user-generated content. We also have over 1000 taxonomy terms, and we've authored detailed definitions for nearly half.
Our redesign last month upgraded the three-year-old Drupal 4.7-based site to Drupal 6. More importantly, we used the flexibility of Drupal to completely re-architect how users find and interact with our content. Where previously we had separate sections of research and news, our new tabbed interface displays -- in a search engine friendly fashion -- all of the relevant content for each of over 1000 different therapy topics.